Truth Be Told

by Kathleen Barber

  “What is this?”

  “I think it’s her journal from when she was with the LFC. Or something like that.”

  With trembling hands, I flipped the book over and squinted at the words. Mostly written in blue ballpoint pen, some of the words were smudged beyond recognition and others were written in such tiny handwriting that I couldn’t make them out. But even the words that I could read were difficult to understand. It might have been a journal, but it might have also been her LFC notes. It was hard to tell.

  You are here, the first line read. End of the rainbow. Gold is sun. Sun is life. shiny sun safety serenity sanity.

  My stomach twisted. I had spent so many years longing to know more about our enigmatic mother, but now that a glimpse into the life she spent with the cult might literally be beneath my fingertips, I wasn’t sure I had the guts. I wanted to remember my mother as the gentle, caring woman she had been, not the incoherent person who had scribbled these notes. I didn’t think she would want me to remember her like that, either.

  “I don’t think we should read this,” I said, closing the handbook. “You remember how secretive she was about her journals. She wouldn’t want us to read her private thoughts.”

  “She’s not going to mind,” Lanie said softly.

  I shook my head, unable to explain the truth to Lanie: I didn’t want to know.

  “Josie, this is our only chance to know what she was like after she left us. We have to read it. We owe it to her.” She took the handbook from me and began reading aloud. “Get it out. Start at the beginning. Start here. You are here. You are here. Here. Everywhere you go, there you are.”

  “This isn’t going to tell us anything,” I protested. “Listen to her.”

  “Come on,” Lanie urged, pulling me down into a seat beside her and spreading the book open on our combined knees. “Let’s just keep with it. Maybe some of it will make sense.”

  Lanie’s instincts proved correct: as we flipped the pages, each of us reading silently, our mother’s cursive became less shaky, her sentences more complete. As it became easier to follow her thoughts, I realized it wasn’t a journal in the sense that she was recording present-day events. Rather, she seemed to be documenting major events from her life, both good and bad, and not necessarily in chronological order: there was her marriage to our father (happiest girl in the world) and there was Uncle Dennis’s death (all my fault all my fault all my fault).

  Then I came across a sentence that said, And there were the cupcakes. Shocked myself. If J hadn’t . . . Didn’t sleep for a week after. Stupid, careless. But lesson learned: no sense in doing a job halfway.

  My stomach dropped. What about the cupcakes? I quickly scanned the page but saw no other references to them. Had she done something to them? But what? And why? Had she . . . had she tried to poison me? With a start, I remembered: that cupcake hadn’t been for me.

  It had been for our father.

  I turned to Lanie, unsure how to put the wild theories flying around in my head into words, unable to believe it myself, and saw her face completely devoid of color. Was she remembering the cupcake incident as well?

  “Lanie? What’s wrong?”

  “This,” she said quietly, laying her finger down on another portion of the page.

  And I saw her wearing pearls. Pearls. It was a sign. It all comes back to pearls, from the first. That horrid Pearl Leland was only the first.

  “Pearl Leland,” I read aloud. “What is . . . Is she saying that Dad had an affair with Professor Leland?”

  Lanie nodded, squeezing her eyes shut. “I think so.”

  As I watched my sister rock back and forth, arms wrapped tightly around her and eyes shut, I realized there was something more upsetting to her than learning that our father had carried on more than one affair.

  “There’s something else, isn’t there?” I asked, touching her lightly on the shoulder.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “The night Dad was killed . . .”

  “Are you saying Pearl Leland killed our father?” I gasped.

  Lanie shook her head. “I think . . . I think Mom did.”

  Cymbals crashed in my head; my mouth went metallic. A hundred tiny explosions went off in my mind, the shrapnel falling together into something that looked like order. Still, I resisted.

  “No,” I said firmly, ignoring the fact that I had been about to voice a similar concern.

  “Listen,” Lanie said, speaking quickly, her voice thin. “The night Dad was killed, I heard someone before I reached the kitchen. They said something that sounded like, ‘First Pearl, and now . . .’ ”

  “Are you sure?” I demanded. “Why is this the first time you’ve mentioned it?”

  “Because I wasn’t certain what I heard. It wasn’t clear, and I couldn’t make out what it meant. Honestly, sometimes I thought it was all in my head. I mean, it didn’t make sense for Warren to say that, right? And I was certain it was Warren.”

  “Then how can you be certain now?”

  Lanie swallowed. “Because I’m starting to remember. Not just that. Other things. Like what I saw.”

  “Melanie Cave,” I said weakly. “You saw Melanie Cave, remember?”

  “I’m sorry, Josie,” she said, her eyes wide and wet. “But it was Mom. And I think I can prove it with the gun.”

  I shook my head stubbornly. “They never found the gun.”

  “No,” she allowed. “But I’m certain the shooter held it in a left hand. Mom was left-handed.”

  “Lanie—”

  “And I think I know where it is.”

  I looked from Lanie’s grim face down to the words scribbled in the back of the handbook: And there were the cupcakes. Even if Lanie’s memory couldn’t be trusted, something had been wrong with those cupcakes. If she was admitting to poisoning them . . . I thought of the stack of photos she had brought with her to the LFC, my father’s clear absence in them. Had she really been angry enough to attempt murder?

  And, if she had tried it once, would she have been determined enough to try again?

  chapter 23

  It was half past five when Lanie and I arrived on Cyan Court. It was, as ever, a calm little loop of road in a tidy subdivision. I had not seen my childhood home in more than ten years, and the sight of it took my breath away. Part of me had always assumed that the house would forever carry the indelible mark of the tragedy that happened inside it. I expected to find it encased in a perpetual cloud of gloom or fallen into disrepair, my father’s murder permanently visible to passersby.

  And yet, there it was, looking perfectly unremarkable. The house stood just as we had left it: a white Dutch colonial with jaunty blue trim and window boxes crowded with the remains of colorful petunias. The porch had been repainted and the swing straightened, but the big elm tree in the front yard remained the same.

  Standing on that sidewalk, where the initials we had traced into wet cement so many years ago were still visible, our suspicions seemed absurd. If our mother had killed our father, we would see the evidence of it. The trim little community could not have concealed such a ground-shaking secret; it would have withered under its weight.

  Hand in hand, Lanie and I crept toward our old backyard. The unfamiliar landscaping was difficult to navigate in the predawn darkness, and I tripped over an unfurled garden hose and stumbled through rosebushes, their tiny thorns tearing at my ankles. I froze at the door of our old playhouse, nostalgia and a sense of dark foreboding preventing me from going farther. Lanie barreled past me, yanking open the small door with determination and stepping inside.

  Tentatively, I followed her, my sense of dread so strong I nearly expected to see the walls smeared with blood. Instead, the interior of the playhouse looked bright and cheerful. The walls, which had originally been painted the same moss green as our dining room, had been repainted a sunny yellow, and pink flowered curtains had been hung over the miniature windows. A pink plastic table stood in the corner, and a one-eyed doll and a stuffed panda we
re seated at it, small pink plastic teacups in front of them. A box of Fig Newtons was on the table between the toys.

  Lanie looked around briefly and then headed straight for the sink.

  A cheap plastic frame holding a picture of Prince William and Princess Kate had been propped up over it, and Lanie tossed it onto the table. She struggled to dig her fingertips between the edge of the sink and the wall, groaning with effort.

  “Help me,” she hissed. “They’ve caulked it or something.”

  “What are you even doing?”

  “Remember the hiding place behind the sink?” she asked grimly.

  Numbly, I stepped to her side, trying hard not to think about what we were doing. This little playhouse held so many happy memories; I couldn’t imagine it concealing such a horrific secret. I dug my nails into the rubbery caulking, my fingertips scratching against the wall until they finally closed around the edge of the sink.

  Lanie let out a triumphant yelp. She counted to three, and together we tugged with all our might. The sink resisted at first, but finally pulled away from the wall with a shudder. We stumbled backward, surprised by our effort, and dropped the sink on the ground. Where it had once been, there was nothing but a small, dark hole. Limbs heavy with dread, I pulled out my phone and switched on its flashlight. I aimed the small beam inside the hole, illuminating a stack of books, a pile of shiny candy wrappers, and something dark with a dull, menacing gleam. My stomach dropped so fast I nearly fainted.

  Lanie was right. She knew where the gun was. That meant . . .

  I regained my senses just in time to stop Lanie as she reached for it. “Don’t touch it.”

  “Freeze!” someone shouted behind us.

  We turned in unison to find a man in running shorts and a Chicago Bears sweatshirt outside the playhouse door, brandishing a baseball bat and glaring at us.

  “I’ve called the police,” he announced. “So I think you better scram.”

  “Actually,” Lanie said, casting a sad smile toward the hidden gun, “I think we’ll stick around. I have something I’d like to tell them.”

  • • •

  We spent the day in stunned silence. I repeatedly chastised myself for permitting Lanie to leave with the unsmiling police officers who had met us on Cyan Court. They were young, squarely in Poppy Parnell’s target demographic, and the smirk they exchanged upon hearing Lanie’s name made my stomach turn. It was obvious they didn’t believe Lanie had simply found the gun. They thought she put it there.

  When they suggested—their tone indicating it was less of a suggestion and more of a command—Lanie accompany them to the station to make a statement, I should have insisted on driving her myself. I never should have let her climb in the backseat of their car, or, at the very least, I should have insisted on riding back there with her. I should have demanded she call an attorney.

  But I was too stunned by the discovery that my father had been murdered by my mother to behave rationally, and I drove back to Aunt A’s house alone. After haltingly explaining to the others what Lanie had remembered (a report that was greeted with shocked silence), I spent the day repeatedly calling the police station, alternating between politely inquiring after my sister and sarcastically asking just how long it took them to take a statement. I was finally told to stop making a nuisance of myself and it was hinted that any further calls might be considered harassment, and so I took to pacing the floor. I ignored the calls from my boss, who was following up on my vague voicemail stating I wouldn’t be back in New York that day after all, and the calls from Clara, obviously dispatched by my boss. The only thing I could think about was my sister.

  As upset as I was, I couldn’t blame the officers for suspecting Lanie had hidden the gun. After all, she had been the one to finally find it. And it hadn’t been that long since I had entertained similar thoughts myself, and she was my own sister.

  Like this was my own mother.

  Bile surged into my mouth, and I swallowed it, cringing as the acid burned my throat. I reached for a glass of water on the coffee table and spotted the LFC handbook resting harmlessly beside it. Slowly, I picked it up and flipped to my mother’s words, half hoping that I would find them different, that lack of sleep had made the two of us paranoid and delusional. But there they were: the reference to Pearl Leland, the mention of the cupcakes.

  I flung the journal across the room, where it hit the wall with an unsatisfying clunk and fell to the floor. Rage fluttered in my limbs; I wanted more destruction. Her belongings couldn’t just sit there intact, as though she had been a normal woman. She hadn’t been—she had been a murderer. My own mother. Emitting an anguished shriek that sent Bubbles scurrying from the room, I turned to the rest of my mother’s belongings, still heaped on the floor where Lanie had left them. I snapped strands of beads and tore at scarves, smashing an incense burner under my foot and throwing the shards at the wall. I didn’t stop my rampage until Caleb rushed into the room and physically pinned my arms to my sides, whispering soothing words in my ear until I sagged against him, nothing left but tears and an unbearable sadness that threatened to eat me alive if I let it.

  • • •

  “Don’t you think we should have heard something by now?” Aunt A worried, using a chopstick to push a breaded piece of chicken around a paper plate, leaving behind a bright smear of technicolor sauce. She had ordered in enough Chinese food to feed a small army: boxes of sweet-and-sour chicken, beef with broccoli, sesame pork, General Tso’s chicken, and vegetable lo mein, along with multiple tubs of soup and piles of egg rolls, fried wontons, and crab-less crab rangoon. None of us felt like eating, but we had nonetheless assembled glumly around the table, piling food onto our plates that we knew we wouldn’t eat. Only Ann, oblivious to the seriousness of the situation, ate more than a mouthful. Bubbles made off with a crab rangoon and scarfed it greedily in the corner.

  “These things can take time,” Ellen said. “But she’s in good hands. Alec Greene is one of the best criminal defense lawyers in the whole state.”

  I disassembled a fortune cookie, methodically breaking it into small shards. I did not share Ellen’s optimism. It had been twelve hours since Lanie had gone to the police station, six since Adam had called bullshit on Lanie being there voluntarily, and one since Alec Greene, the attorney Peter had recommended, had arrived in Elm Park to confer with Adam in his home. As far as I knew, neither Adam nor Alec had yet made it to the police station. There was no news, but that definitely did not make it good news.

  “Should she even have a criminal defense attorney?” Aunt A asked, forehead creases deepening. “Doesn’t that imply she’s done something wrong?”

  “No one should submit to police interrogation without an attorney,” Ellen said authoritatively. “Especially if they’ve just pointed to a murder weapon that’s been missing for thirteen years.”

  I unfolded the slip of paper hiding inside the cookie: The truth will set you free. I resented maxims masquerading as fortunes, and, given the circumstances, it seemed particularly obnoxious. I shredded it and buried it in my untouched pile of white rice. Caleb squeezed my knee under the table.

  “This is a nightmare,” Aunt A murmured, her chin trembling. “Just when I think we’ve hit rock bottom, that things can’t possibly get any worse, we get knocked to our knees again by something even more awful. The things Lanie is saying Erin did . . .”

  Aunt A trailed off in a ragged choke, and I reached out to touch her soft shoulder. More than anything, I wanted to tell her that things were going to be okay, to reassure her the way she had done for me so many times when I was young. But I couldn’t say with any certainty that things were going to be okay; I could barely even conceive of a scenario in which that would be a possibility. All I could do—all any of us could do—was hope.

  “How can that be true?” Aunt A asked, her voice thick with suppressed tears as she clutched desperately at my hand. “I used to worry your mother was a danger to herself, but I never imagined s
he could hurt someone else, especially your father. She loved him so much.”

  “Obviously not that much,” Ellen said darkly. “Shooting someone in the back of the head isn’t usually how you demonstrate your affection.”

  “Ellen Maureen,” Aunt A snapped. “For God’s sake, show some respect.”

  Ellen looked away, chastened.

  “And on that note,” Caleb said, abruptly pushing his chair back from the table, “I’m going to start clearing the table.”

  I stood to help him, but he gently pushed me back into my chair and began stacking our hardly touched paper plates. As he ferried them out to the kitchen and began making return trips to collect the still-full take-out boxes, Ellen murmured an apology to her mother and Ann passed Bubbles another crab rangoon. On a different day, Aunt A might have reprimanded her grandniece for feeding fried food to the aged cat, but on that evening, when Lanie sat at the police station, her future unknown, the shadow of her accusation hanging over us, Aunt A merely winced.

  “When’s Mom coming home?” Ann asked suddenly.

  “Soon,” Aunt A said, her voice cracking on the lie.

  Ellen’s face was pained as she watched Aunt A swallow back tears, struggling to maintain an unconcerned façade for Ann. She squeezed her mother’s hand and then turned to Ann with false brightness and suggested a game of “beauty parlor” upstairs. I remembered how dismissive my sister had always been of Ellen’s attempted makeovers, and I had to wonder what she would think of Ellen turning the nail polish brushes and mascara wands on her eight-year-old daughter, but Ann eagerly agreed. As Ann raced for the stairs, Aunt A nodded a silent thanks to Ellen, who kissed the crown of her mother’s head in return.

  As Ellen and Ann mounted the stairs, Aunt A turned to me, her eyes dripping with new abandon, and asked, “It’s possible Lanie’s wrong, isn’t it? More than possible, actually. It’s likely—don’t you think? She was so certain it was Warren Cave. If she was confused once before, doesn’t it make sense that she would be confused again?”